Analytics

Frustration. I have been poking and prodding at the world of affiliate marketing / advertisement. It’s been since the first of April this year that I made any such attempt and my findings are pretty conclusive.

As you can see in the above chart from Google Analytics, I have been able to bring a fair amount of traffic to the site. I have noticed, the more I post, the more traffic I get. Posting to social networks such as twitter and facebook had almost no impact, but to Digg and Reddit, I saw immediate jumps in traffic. I am now averaging 400+ unique visitors per month and ZERO advertisement clicks, which is how I would earn money.

The spike in the above image is from June, where I posted a topic about Myspace being dead, and posted a link to Reddit, and it jumped and got 1900 visitors one day, 658 visitors the next. How many clicks did I get? 2 (earning $0.98)

What I have come to realize is that you can bring the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. So what happened? How did I drive that much traffic to the site only to get 2 clicks? (That is a .08% conversion rating, HORRIBLE) The goal is to have 1-3% conversion or more. So for every 100 visitors have 1-3 clicks. Google adsense ads are super cheezy, not appealing and CLEARLY advertising. IMO, no one clicks because of the stale looking advertisements, not to mention, becoming less and less relevant to my content.

Currently I am looking at a more up-to-date marketing strategy. If you look at nettuts.com their whole right side is flooded with advertisement. But it is done so in such an attractive way, it doesn’t detract from the body of the website, AND I have caught myself of several occasions clicking on them.

The goal is to redesign the website with a more friendly, inviting layout, and convert my advertisement links to these more relevant, good looking links. I will provide more of an update when available.